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IE Standardization Fading Fast
alphadogg writes "Just as Internet users in general have defected in huge numbers from Microsoft Internet Explorer over the past several years, the business world, as well, is becoming less dependent on the venerable browser. Companies that used to mandate the use of IE for access to web resources are beginning to embrace a far more heterodox attitude toward web browsers. While it hasn't gone away, the experience of having to use IE 6 to access some legacy in-house web app is becoming less common. 'A lot of it has to do with the emergence of the modern web and the popularity of mobile. They have made it very different for companies to truly standardize on a browser,' says Gartner Research analyst David Mitchell Smith."
I've seen a lot of people start making this mistake again, but now it's the KHTML/Safari/Chrome/Opera engine, especially on mobile.
Let's hope companies also stop mandating the use of Shockwave and JavaScript, or at least let me use the web site without having to completely disable NoScript.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I don't believe IE ever deserved to be called venerable.
It was a typo. They meant to write 'vulnerable'.
For every business that Gartner "knows" is dropping IE standardization, there are 100 it doesn't know about who are continuing to mandate IE use because they bought some legacy Web-based app that is only used internally, and the people who wrote that app were too lazy or incompetent to write it in actual HTML (as opposed to "we played with it until it worked in this browser, so this is what your users must use").
My favorite example of a web-app developer who knew virtually nothing about HTML but shipped what "worked" had every single element on the page absolute-positioned with CSS. What looked like a simple table of 30 rows of data on the screen was actually hundreds of DIVs that had been rendered on the fly by the server with absolute position coordinates for each one. Even INPUT elements that were invisible had absolute positions calculated for them. Every time someone loaded a page, the server would calculate the offset for each "cell" in the table so it would look like a table, and for dozens of invisible form elements so they wouldn't collide with the table. The billion-dollar non-tech company that bought this couldn't figure out why the server frequently became unresponsive... They actually bought a second server from the developer and a load balancer to get around the fact that the developer didn't understand basic HTML, and have been using the app for 7 years. When I explained the problem to them, they reasoned that it would cost them more to ask the developer to do it properly that to just add additional servers as needed. They will probably be using it for the next 20 years. And the login page states that it requires IE.
Often this type of app lives on an internal server that will never be updated because the company doesn't want to pay for something that works well enough, but serves some essential purpose that hundreds or thousands of employees are required to use daily. IE standardization will die out in consumer applications long before it goes away in businesses. Microsoft knew this is how most businesses approach computers, and it's the reason the Windows/Office/IE monopoly was so successful. It's the reason Microsoft is still successful despite the Ballmer decade.
So instead: this is hopefully a sign that, in the world of computing, monopolistic practices will give way to healthy competition.
There we are, tentative but hopeful!
Nice to see that typical snide attitude of "but our site is certified for IE 6, so use it" that was so common among web developers getting its comeuppance by the CEO's latest smartphone. I would have given a dollar to be there every time one of them was told to his face that his site needed to become cross-platform, and pronto. I can only imagine the weeping and gnashing of teeth as the web developer fearfully installed Firefox and Opera and began to learn that awful vocabulary "cross-platform".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sad, isn't it? People are *still* talking about standardizing on browsers instead of enforcing adherence to standardized markup languages.
C|N>K
Isn't it funny how all the hate and anger and lawsuits thrown at MS had pretty much zero affect on their market position, and what really made the most impact was innovation (ie the Mobile (r)evolution).
Isn't it funny how we are replacing one asshole company with one that is an even bigger asshole? I hates the way MSFT pushed IE onto everybody and frankly what we are seeing now is even worse, as at least before you could just lie with the UserAgent and get around a bunch of the bullshit, but now instead of Redmond dictating we got Cupertino and Apple makes MSFT look like big sweaty care bears by comparison.
I mean we went from having an open format be the baseline in HTML V5 to patent troll MPEG-LA getting to stick a tollbooth with H.264, thanks to Apple making it clear "We don't give a fuck what YOU choose, its not running on iPhone/iPad PERIOD" and then to add insult to injury they also pretty much single handedly killed mobile flash where Adobe was at least nice enough to pay the license fees and let any browser or distro run H.264. Now try to bundle H.264 in a free product and see how quick you get a cease and desist, just ask Mozilla.
So if you wanna cheer MSFT losing power? Right there with ya, in fact I championed breaking up the company when they lost the antitrust. But what we are seeing is we are kicking the old lame dog while ignoring the two fucking lions that are saying "kick the dog" while they get ready to take a bite out of our collective asses. say what you want about MSFT but I could take any laptop or desktop and have their shit gone and well on my way to installing any damned thing I wanted in minutes, try that with a Chromebook and see how far you get. The web won't fare any better thanks to Cupertino dictating everything, If Apple has their way the only browser will be Webkit and only Apple approved formats will be on the web and sadly? Its seriously looking like they are gonna get their wish, Flash gone, Opera dropping their engine so they can get on iToys (and I wouldn't be surprised if moz goes to as they won't get on the iPhone/iPad if they don't bow to Cupertino's wishes) and video controlled by a patent troll...where is things getting better again? This is like saying "Instead of the guy on the corner kicking us in the face the guy across the street just hits us with a brick!"...uhhh, how about neither guy hitting us at all? How about being able to choose none of the above? wouldn't that be better?
If there is one thing we need to protect its an open web but all we are doing is replacing one master for another and that's just not the way we should be going, we should be trying for no masters at all.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"We need to spend money to get rid of IE" doesn't fly with management.
"You can't run that on your iPad because it needs IE" however, does.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Microsoft: Develops proprietary non-standard browser set to default on their dominating operating system, takes over the web
Apple: forks an open source browser project, develops Webkit out of it, gives it back to the community and works with the community, refuses to support proprietary buggy exploit-ridden browser plug-ins and helps kill it off from the web
i'm not happy about the whole h.264 thing either, but at least we know they have a reason--their idevices are only capable of decoding h.264 in hardware. it doesn't really make it any better but what they have done isn't anything near what MSFT did 10+ years ago.
Scorta futuere amo!
When Apple gets a 90% share of the browser market, and you routinely see sites telling users "You must be running Safari to access this site," let us know.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.